Jeff Reh, member of Board of Directors for Beretta U.S.A. Comments on Move to Tennesee

Tennessee - -(Ammoland.com)- The Beretta family has manufactured products and done business from the same town in northern Italy for almost 500 years.

This means that when Beretta chooses a location for its business, we plan not just in terms of a return on investment within the next few years. We also start with the possibility that we will be in that location for decades, if not hundreds of years, to come.

Around March 2013 the Beretta family decided to expand its manufacturing and business operations outside Maryland, where Beretta U.S.A. is located. We started our search by looking only at States that have a consistent history of support for and likelihood of future support for Second Amendment rights.

We then reduced this list of States further by looking at traditional business-related factors such as tax rates, cost of living, cost of doing business, availability of white and blue collar workers, traditions of high-level manufacturing in the area, the quality of local educational institutions, availability of job recruitment, screening and training, and so forth.

From that analysis we reduced our list of States to seven. Working through the Governor’s Office in each of those states, we came up with a list of 80 sites within those seven States that we then visited over the past five months. Based on those visits we narrowed the list of 80 sites down to six. Then we made second and third visits to those locations and reduced that list to three.

We scored each of those three locations using 20 evaluation criteria and, based on those evaluations, we unanimously chose Gallatin, Tennessee as the best of all the candidate locations we saw. Our choice was then confirmed through a personal visit by Mr. Ugo Gussalli Beretta, Franco’s father, to Gallatin on December 30, 2013.

I can say, based on this very rigorous search methodology, that not only was Tennessee the best State we found within which to locate our business, but also that Gallatin provided the best location for us within Tennessee. We thus move forward with confidence knowing that Tennessee is a great place to do business. We look forward to our opportunities here and we look forward to working side-by-side with our new Tennessee neighbors.

Beretta, established in 1526, is the oldest industrial dynasty in the world tracing its roots through 16 generations of continuous family ownership. Firearms bearing the Beretta name have been sold for almost 500 years. Beretta USA Corp. was founded in 1977 and supplies the standard sidearm to the U.S. Armed Forces. Today, Beretta manufactures, distributes and markets a complete line of firearms, accessories and apparel. Beretta also owns and operates six retail Beretta Gallery stores worldwide. For additional information, visit www.beretta.com.

Welcome to Tennessee! I am so glad to see a quality manufacturer like Beretta,USA bring skilled employment positions to Middle Tennessee. As a former (32 years) public school teacher and Administrator, I have seen young people reluctantly leave our area for out of state positions. Again, Welcome Beretta,USA and let me know if I can assist you in any way.

Honored to have you in Tennessee. I need to point out that the Second Amendment is nice of course, but Tennessee’s own constitutional protections related to the rights to keep, bear, and wear firearms are very strong, I think stronger than the Second Amendment.

Every gun manufacturer in the United States needs to relocate their factories to red states. I know this may put an economic hardship on them to just up an move, but I wonder, if in the future, the blue states will make it almost impossible to produce quality weapons for their markets. S&W and Ruger has already balked at selling their guns in California, because of the law passed about micro-stamping the bullets so they can be traced back to the gun that fired it. It’s an impossible task, it will make guns unreliable, and is to costly! What the liberal anti gun people are trying to do is make guns obsolete. Check it out! Google S&W and Ruger quitting California! This is real folks! The liberals don’t outnumber us, but they have a lot of money behind them, ie, George Soros, Bloomberg, et al.